Levy Restaurants Chief Executive Andy Lansing takes a simple approach to hiring. He looks, he says, "for nice" when trying to place talent at one of his company's 15 restaurants and 100-plus food-service venues, from Churchill Downs to Lambeau Field.

The 51-year-old with perfect hair and a boyish smile even asks job-seekers during interviews: "Are you nice?"

The question is startling and creative — but it seemed contradictory as Lansing spoke to a roomful of new Levy managers at the company's recent management academy.

"We only hire nice people in this company," Lansing said, striking the podium inside the private dining room at Spiaggia, the company's crown jewel on Michigan Avenue, for a very un-nice effect. "And as I've said many times, you may sneak in on us. You may get in without being nice, but I promise you we'll get you. It may take a week. It may take a month. It may take a year. We will get you."

Lansing defines "nice" as the golden rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated.

"You've gotta be nice to be successful here," he continued, after endorsing the book "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." "You can be competitive, direct and all the things that make you a successful businessperson. But at the heart of it, you've gotta have it in here."

It's one thing to demand kindness from workers whose jobs involve serving people. But can a chief executive of a large company really be nice?

Larry Levy and his brother Mark founded the business in 1978 with an investment in D.B. Kaplan's Delicatessen at Water Tower Place. When it nearly failed, they took over and moved their mother, Eadie, from St. Louis to Chicago to teach the cooks some of her recipes. Lansing calls her "the company mom."

Lansing joined the company in 1988, as general counsel. Larry promoted him to an operations role in 1991, to chief operating officer in 1995 and to CEO in 2004. Larry now has the title of chairman; Mark left the company in 1998.

"Andy is superb; he not only never missed his numbers, he always beat his numbers," Larry said. "And they were never easy numbers. We negotiated the numbers. As proof of it, in 2008, when the world fell apart, he missed his numbers by a fraction. He was only off by 10 percent. Just a great businessman."

In 2000, Larry sold 49 percent of the company to British-based Compass Group PLC, the world's largest food-service company, and then the rest in 2006. The Tribune described the sale as ending direct ownership of an empire, but Eadie still works most days as the hostess at Fulton's on the River, another Levy restaurant. And the other day, there was Larry walking out of the elevator at Levy headquarters.

'Nice guy' brand grows

Lansing has been able to produce results that seem to have spared Levy from interference from Compass. In September 2007, the year after Compass completed the acquisition, Crain's Chicago Business reported Levy's annual revenues were $690 million. In January of this year, a Kellogg School of Management newsletter reported revenues to be nearly $1 billion.Compass does not release revenue figures for Levy, and Levy declined to confirm them.

But Compass is pleased."In Levy, our sports and leisure business, double-digit new business and excellent retention, combined with a continued focus on cost efficiencies, has contributed to a solid performance," according to the parent company's 2010 annual report.

Compass has helped, handing over contracts for the U.S. Open and Cleveland Browns Stadium to Levy, for instance. But it also is reaping the benefit of Levy's reputation, changing the name of its UK sports operations to Levy, with more countries to follow.

Lansing said he bought into Levy's nice-guy culture and then ran with it.

"The 'nice' thing, I didn't invent," he told the approximately 60 managers at the academy. "Larry Levy is really the guy to be credited for 'We only hire nice people at Levy.' I wanted to turn that from something that's really neat to say to something that's really neat to do. And we just grew with it over time, and in part, it's selfish. I only want to work around nice people. I know maybe that's Pollyanna. But why would I want to work around jerks?"

The data shows Lansing has protected Levy's culture. Turnover among managers during the company's last fiscal year was 8.8 percent, according to Cindy Noble, Levy's senior vice president of human resources. Among hourly workers, it was 20.8 percent. The industry average ranged from 33 percent to 71 percent, depending on the type of restaurant and whether the worker was paid hourly or by salary, according to the National Restaurant Association's 2010 operations report.

During the recession, Levy moved employees to other restaurants or venues and, in some cases, to other cities, rather than fire them. And with every new full-time hire, Lansing pens an old-fashioned welcome note. A gift basket arrives in the mail.

Employees at each location select a Levy Legend every month for above-and-beyond efforts, which are often powerful enough to make executives misty-eyed. Photos of Lansing and Larry Levy with the award winners line the hallway leading to his office.

Larry Levy credits Lansing with implementing in the early 1990s a phantom-equity program, which simulated stock ownership in the then-private company, to motivate senior executives and managers. The participants, Levy said, "split up a very large amount of money" twice in each step of the sale to Compass. But Lansing is convinced participants "would have worked just as hard without it, because I think those are the kinds of people we have in the company."

And Lansing flies every new manager to Chicago for the one-week management academy. Some fly in from Britain, making the effort an expensive one. After an hourlong speech from Lansing, attendees had an hour to ask him questions.

"I got a short story," a guy in the back said after raising his hand. "My name's Thomas. I've been with the company for six months … My third day at work I came in and found a card. 'Chef Thomas, Welcome to the company.' Yada. Yada. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. 'Thank you, Andy Lansing.' I looked at my janitor and said, 'Who's Andy Lansing?' And he says, 'He's the CEO of the company.' That's never happened to me before.

"I got home that night. There was a FedEx package on my front porch. And it had a cookbook from Chef Tony (Mantuano of Spiaggia), and chocolates, coffee and food, and Levy Restaurants mugs in there. I was telling my wife, 'I've worked for other big restaurant companies. I've worked at a casino in Vegas. I've never had that happen before.'

"This company has been around since the 1980s, and the restaurant culture back then, was, you know, we're going to lead by fear. When was the concept of nice, passionate, hard-working … when did that light bulb go off?"

"You can't pinpoint a time," Lansing answered. A few sentences later he addressed the welcome gifts. "The only complaint I've ever had with Levy was my first day of work. I showed up. I was shown my office. People were very nice; they were saying 'Hi.' But there was nothing going on. Nobody said, 'Hey, let's go to lunch.' Nobody said, 'Let me show you around.' It was sort of like, 'here you are.' And I swore at that time, if I ever had the ability, it would never happen to anybody. I wanted people, when they first showed up on the first day, to know you're family and you'd say, 'Wow. This is different.'"

Levy said an early assignment Lansing had at the company was to "make people disappear." Levy meant the term as a joke, because Lansing's hobby is magic. (At age 10, dressed in a top hat and cape, Lansing began performing tricks at birthday parties, earning $50 a performance.) But the need to eliminate some employees was real.

"It was just obvious they had to be fired," Levy said, adding that he and his brother were never good at "the basics," such as performance evaluations or demanding accountability. "Andy does such a thorough job. Thorough would be a great adjective for Andy. He does such a great job and frequent job of letting people know where they stand. And then if somebody does get fired, they know they should get fired. It's not 'not nice.' It's just not cruel."

Lansing's ascent coincided with the company's dive into more lucrative sports concessions contracts, starting with the luxury suites at old Comiskey Park in 1982. Levy now dominates that sector. Of the 30 NBA arenas, Levy has food-service agreements with roughly two-thirds of them, including the Nets' future home, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

That has forced the company to look for new revenue sourcesto expand. They've done everything from consulting for a now-shuttered amusement park inside the Mall of America to managing the food service at a Roman Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles. The company is now homing in on ski resorts and universities, most recently inking contracts with Purdue, Iowa and Missouri.To the cranky, the Levy mission of bringing restaurant-quality food and service to concession stands can feel inauthentic.

"The food sold at the U.S. Open cannot be found in nature," Joe Queenan wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month. "I don't actually believe that a drink called watermelon & riki exists; I think the (U.S. Tennis Association) invented it. I feel the same way about the Flaming Ouzo Shrimp ... There's also no such thing as La Poulet; it's Le Poulet. If you're going to charge people $11 for a plate of chicken, at least you can get the French right."

Burrito stand in the snow

On its busiest days, usually when the U.S. Open coincides with football and baseball games and a NASCAR race, the company could be serving up to 3.2 million people, often in far-from-ideal kitchens. Lansing said that at Wrigley Field, where the company began managing concessions in 1985,the one full-equipped kitchen is smaller than kitchens in many of his friend's homes.

But to others, Levy's focus on innovation and quality has hit the mark. The company, for instance, is operating gluten-free stands at places like CenturyLink Field in Seattle and the Georgia Dome.And atthe Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in California, Levy has converted a Sno-Cat, a monster of a machine capable of driving up and down the slopes, into a burrito stand for hard-core skiers who don't want to come down the mountain to eat.

On the restaurant end, the company is replacing Bistro 110 on Pearson Street with Bar Toma. Mantuano, Spiaggia's James Beard Foundation Award-winning chef, said the menu will feature salads on a pizzalike crust, an idea brought to his attention by Lansing, who, in turn, learned of them from his teenage daughter, who discovered them on a trip to Italy.

"When I first did the menu for Bar Toma, one of his comments was that he thought that this was an area of Chicago where there were a lot of 'ladies who lunch,' who enjoyed salads, and that we could have used more salads on the menu," Mantuano said. "I thought about it, and I stopped at RL and other restaurants in the neighborhood. And he was right."

On "a separate point," Mantuano said, Lansing showed him his daughter's photos from Italy and said, "'Do what you want with this. It's up to you.' It's not like he's forcing it down your throat. Ever. Ever."

"But you listened?" I asked. "You're a James Beard Award winner, and he has no culinary training whatsoever?"

The sheer scale of what Levy does every year is difficult to grasp. Larry Levy likened serving food at the U.S. Open, the company's largest event, to "major military campaign planning." Over the course of the two-week tournament, Levy brings in 3,500 workers, including 250 chefs. The company sells 225,000 hamburgers and hot dogs and 7.5 tons of crab, lobster and shrimp at the event.

At the Kentucky Oaks and Derby, the Levy team pours 120,000 mint juleps in two days.

It's difficult to achieve perfection in those conditions. The Tribune recently reported that city health inspectors found 20 critical food violations at Wrigley Field in August. And in 2010, three U.S. Open suite attendants sued Levy and other companiesfor failing to pay overtime and not treating service charges as gratuities for distribution to employees during the 2004 to 2009 tournaments.The employees claimed they worked more than 100 hours each week during the tournament.

Levy declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Lansing said the key to the company's success is the attitude — yes, the niceness — of its front-line workers. (Levy employs more than 25,000 people, 2,000 of whom work full-time.) And he emphasized over and over again during the management academy that those employees will never be nice if they are treated poorly.

"Not growing up in the hospitality industry, I had a lot of learning to do," Lansing told them. "One thing I figured out really quickly is that the exact way that I treat our people is how they're going to treat the guest. You could throw away every management leadership book in the world, and that's what it boils down to. If I kick your ass in a pre-shift meeting, and then tell you to go on the floor and smile, and take care of the guests, my hunch is that's not going to happen.

Lansing also told them: "There is no lower form of human life than criticizing someone in front of someone else. … Don't ever criticize somebody when someone else is around."

Over lunch at Jake Melnick's Corner Tap, a Levy restaurant on East Superior Street, he mentioned that he thought the corn bread wasn't sweet enough.

But rather than flag down a waiter to complain or call the chef out of the kitchen — in front of me — he set the dish aside and said he would handle it later.

A few minutes later, a waiter came by and moved a tiny black cup back next to the corn bread.

"Oh, that's what that was," Lansing said.

He had forgotten about the honey butter. After slathering it on and taking a bite, Lansing determined no criticism was necessary at all.

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